Fonts on Macintosh

OS X Yosemite used Helvetica Neue, and preceding versions largely employed Lucida Grande.

On the left and right sides of the outline, the Unicode range that the character belongs to is given using hexadecimal digits.

This font provides a relatively complete set of Arabic, Roman, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Thai and Greek letters and an assortment of common symbols.

The original font set was custom designed for the Macintosh and was intended to provide a screen legibility.

Some later Apple QuickDraw–based laser printers supported four-times font printing for letter quality output.

Commercial typefaces such as Times and Helvetica began to be distributed by Apple, Adobe Systems and others.

This allowed for true WYSIWYG printing in a much broader set of circumstances than the base system software, however with a noticeable speed penalty, especially on Motorola 68000–based machines.

Apple provided TrueType outline files for the bitmapped 'city' system fonts, allowing letter quality WYSIWYG printing.

Despite this, ATM and PostScript Type 1 fonts continued to be widely used, especially for professional desktop publishing.

Starting with Mac OS 8.5, the operating system supported data fork fonts, including Windows TrueType and OpenType.

At the same time, support was added for TrueType collection files, conventionally with the filename extension .ttc.

Starting with version 7.1, Apple unified the implementation of non-roman script systems in a programming interface called WorldScript.

In 8.5, full Unicode support was added to Mac OS through an API called ATSUI.

However, WorldScript remained the dominant technology for international text on the classic MacOS, because few applications used ATSUI.

While the underlying mathematics of TrueType is thus simpler, many type developers prefer to work with cubic curves because they are easier to draw and edit.

A Zapf table, for example, maps composite glyphs to characters and vice versa and adds other features.

QuickDraw GX fonts could be in either TrueType or PostScript Type 1 formats and included additional information about the glyphs and their purpose.

Advanced features, such as ligatures, glyph variations, kerning information and small caps, could be used by any GX enabled application.

These patents have proven problematic to developers and vendors of open source software for TrueType rendering, such as FreeType.

To avoid infringing on the patents, some software disregarded the hinting information present in fonts, resulting in visual artefacts.

Mac OS X 10.4 introduced an "Automatic" setting which transparently chooses either "Medium" or "Standard," depending on the type of main display.

The quality of the rendering compared to Microsoft's ClearType and FreeType is contested, and is largely a matter of reader preference.

However, Apple's approach differs from that of ClearType and FreeType in that TrueType hinting instructions are discarded for all but the smallest type sizes.

This results in more consistency of rendering on Mac OS at the expense of allowing type designers a level of fine tuning through hints.

Previously, most computer systems were limited to using monospaced fonts, requiring, for example, i and m to be exactly the same width.

Vector-based fonts had yet to appear in the personal computer arena, at least for screen use, so all the original Mac's typefaces were bitmaps.

In Mac OS 8 and 9, Charcoal replaced Chicago as the default system font for menus and window titles, but it could be customized in Preferences.

First, they settled on using the names of stops along the Paoli, Pennsylvania, commuter rail line: Overbrook, Merion, Ardmore, and Rosemont.

Bold, italic, outlined, underlined and shadowed variations were the most common, though some applications also included subscript and superscript.

[citation needed] Apple states in the MacRoman to Unicode mapping file that: On regular US QWERTY keyboards, the logo character can be typed using the key combination Shift Option K (⇧⌥K).